The Social Dilemma
Spoiler alert!
Recently, my friends on Facebook — who are mostly working in Tech field — are sharing a documentary film which calls The Social Dilemma. The 1hr30 movie mentions about how technology — particularly media and social networks affect our way of life.
Personal data concerns are not new, we all aware of that, especially after the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018, but we still can’t stop ourselves from using those social networks as well as stop them from keeping collecting our data without consent.
“We’re the product. Our attention is the product being sold to advertisers.” — Justin Rosenstein
Those giants, are not selling our data but use it to make a model, and so they can monetize from that, by making us see more advertisements. They know us more than we know ourselves. Algorithms control what we see, how we think, they can even manipulate our behaviors for the business beneficial, in many cases — is money
I like to say that algorithms are opinions embedded in code. And that algorithms are not objective. Algorithms are optimised to some definition of success. So if you can imagine, if a commercial enterprise builds an algorithm, to their definition of success, it’s a commercial interest. It’s usually profit. — Cathy O’Neil
Social media platforms are the resources of many life problems, from depressed, phone addicted to suicide, event there is a syndrome called “Snapchat dysmorphia” — young patients wanting surgery so they can look more like they do in filtered selfies. The point is more convincing when we see the ex-employees and leaders of Facebook who use to be in charge of designing those features speaking about the purposes of it and how they feel in the movie.
“When we were making the like button, our entire motivation was ‘can we spread positivity and love in the world?’ The idea that fast forward to today and teens would be getting depressed when they don’t have enough likes or it could be leading to political polarisation was nowhere on our radar.” — Justin Rosenstein
But, to be honest, we can’t stop using them, because our friends, family, business are on the internet, we don’t want to be disconnected from the world. So, in order to avoid being manipulated, here are some recommendations:
- Reclaim your screen time
- Take the algorithm detox, always choose what you want to see. Be conscious of suggestions.
- Read the news from different perspectives, verify it.
- Learn more about which actions should be taken here
The Social Dilemma is a worth seeing movie which is also set an alert to us about modern life’s problems and how to get away from that.
